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The Police State and Your Texts: Police Groups Vie For Mandatory Collection of All Text Messages

thepoliticalfreakshow:

As Congress mulls changes to an outdated law intended to protect electronic privacy, a group of law enforcement officers is lobbying for a provision that would erode privacy by requiring that text messages be saved and stored for at least two years. According to CNET, police and prosecutors’ groups say they have increasingly come to rely on text messages as evidence in criminal cases, and they are vying for a mandated storage period in amendments to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act now being considered:

[T]he Senate Judiciary committee … approved sweeping amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act last week. Unlike earlier drafts, the latest one veers in a very privacy-protective direction by requiring police to obtain a warrant to read the contents of e-mail messages; the SMS push by law enforcement appears to be a way to make sure it includes one of their priorities too.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the law enforcement proposal is to store the contents of SMS messages, or only the metadata such as the sender and receiver phone numbers associated with the messages. Either way, it’s a heap of data: Forrester Research reports that more than 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the U.S. last year, over 6 billion SMS messages a day.

Among the groups urging the mandate are the Mayor Cities Police Chiefs Association, the National District Attorneys’ Association, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies. These agencies are not alone in vying for more data collection and retention. The Department of Justice last year called for laws requiring Internet providers to retain data. But the American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Calabrese points out that any such proposal certainly doesn’t belong in discussions of reform of the law intended to protect electronic privacy.

Evidence suggests that wireless carriers have a range of evolving policies on retaining text messages, from no retention at all to 180 days. Most companies, however, appear not to have policies that messages be stored for a time period even close to two years. A spokesman for U.S. Cellular told CNET that data is stored for just 3-5 days, due to the volume of the content.

Both wireless companies and law enforcement agencies do increasingly store and monitor other kinds of phone data. The New York City Police Department is retaining cell phone logs collected when phones are reported stolen, and other wireless carriers recently reported fielding 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for various types of data.

SCOTUS's Warrantless Wiretapping Punt is a Win for America's Ruling Parties

Both Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney support throwing out due process (warrants) in cases where national security is viewed to be at risk — a policy first put in place by Republican President George W. Bush (with bipartisan support from America’s two ruling parties) in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

How the Camera On Your Cellphone Can Be Captured and Used to Spy on You

As Kade Ellis of Privacy SOS and the ACLU reported, a security expert says that everyone who was at Occupy Wall Street had their cell phone surveyed by the NYPD. “[T]he identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID’d, whether an informant pointed them out, it’s known they were there anyway. This is routine,” private investigator Steven Rambam says in a video talk.

He continued , “[C]ell phones are now the little snitch in your pocket. Cell phones tell me where you are, what you do, who you talk to, everybody you associate with.”

4 Government and Private Entities Conspiring to Track Everything You Do Online and Off

Americans’ personal privacy is being crushed by the rise of a four-headed corporate-state surveillance system.  The four “heads” are: federal government agencies; state and local law enforcement entities; telecoms, web sites & Internet “apps” companies; and private data aggregators (sometimes referred to as commercial data warehouses).

How a drug mule named "Big Foot" helped create terrible GPS search law

Shoddy legal reasoning was used in a decision that bucks the Fourth Amendment.

In the summer of 2006, agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency used GPS tracking technology to locate drug courier Melvin Skinner’s prepaid phone, ultimately seizing more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana from Skinner’s mobile home. The judges on the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit then apparently smoked all of it before issuing their ruling in United States v. Skinner this week, because the opinion approving DEA’s use of GPS technology in this case is easily one of the most muddled examples of legal reasoning I’ve ever encountered—a surreal potpourri of factual misunderstandings, inapt analogies, sloppy and selective appeals to precedent, and logical leaps worthy of Nijinsky.

(Source: Ars Technica)

NSA whistleblower: They’re assembling information on every U.S. citizen

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.

ACLU releases Android app that secretly videos police

The advent of Police Tape is designed to counter a practice an increasing number of civilians have encountered over the past few years: those who videotape or photograph police officers performing routine stops and other official acts are frequently arrested or disciplined. Evidently, many officers are all in favor of increased surveillance as long as it isn’t turned on them.

(Source: Ars Technica)

American Spying on Citizens Hits Record High

The information represents the first time data have been collected nationally on the frequency of cell surveillance by law enforcement. The volume of the requests reported by the carriers — which most likely involve several million subscribers — surprised even some officials who have closely followed the growth of cell surveillance.

(Source: thenewyorktimes.com)

America's Surveillance State Breeds Conformity and Fear

Once the government is able to monitor everything we do and say, we will be unable to fight back.

Predictive tech: An Orwellian nightmare in the making

As “faster than real time” technology capable of predicting our every move is discussed at LeWeb in London this week, it seems prudent to ask whether such developments will actually improve our lives.

You need to know one simple truth: you have no privacy with regard to your electronic communications.

Your seemingly private information is a public commodity, subject to the dictates of the security state and market opportunists.

Government asks: when can we shut down wireless service?

“The system shall be provided with a Network Management System that permits remote interrogation and control of the equipment for the purposes of adjustment, diagnostics, and alarms,” the specifications note. Also—for shutting it down when people protest.

…

“That’s the kind of stuff that happens in places like Egypt, where Mubarak did it to put down the protests, and Tunisia, where the dictator did it to put down protests. That should not be happening here in the United States.”

(Source: Ars Technica)

Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool

 Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

Obama admin wants warrantless access to cell phone location data

(Source: Ars Technica)

FBI holding Carrier IQ data for 'law enforcement purposes'

This is scary because Carrier IQ has recently been found to be factory-installed on most major Android smartphones.  It allegedly can read your texts, record your calls and spy on app usage while reporting back to “HQ”…it was assumed HQ would be the phone companies, however - not Quantico.